Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The intractability of the problem in Egypt is caused by the presence of three, not two, parties to the current dispute.

The first of these parties is the protesters: those demanding a civil state and a proper constitution guaranteeing human rights for all, which the current draft does not. They are women and men, old and young, Christian and Muslim, poor and rich.

The second is the state, represented by the three-headed hydra of Morsi, Badie, and Shater. President Mohammed Morsi is the public face of the beast. Mohammed Badie is the Brotherhood's Supreme Guide, whose words address the members of the Brotherhood. Kairat al-Shater is the organization's most powerful man and its most prominent strategist. The panic of these three men introduced the third party into the current dispute.

This third party is the hordes of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. They are columns of men -- almost always men -- who are bussed into Cairo from outlying neighborhoods and cities for use as the Brotherhood's foot soldiers. They serve as protesters at one moment, as hired guns at another. The reasons they so obediently follow orders is twofold: First, the Muslim Brotherhood indoctrination method requires absolute faith in the group's hierarchical leadership. Second, those in charge are force-feeding them with hatred of the protesters, and they are correspondingly convinced that those who oppose Morsi's decisions are in fact godless heathens who are also paid foreign agents who want to ruin Egypt and allow men to marry men. (There's a very strange fixation on the matter of gay matrimony within Muslim Brotherhood propaganda I find very puzzling.)

Sounds pretty much like religious conservatives using the issue of marriage equality and similar garbage to "other" the Occupy protesters.

The same fights occur everywhere across the globe bearing the same contours. National boundaries and religious and cultural differences are mere window dressing.